


and again and again

by mutterandmumble



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Bad Flirting, First Meetings, Humor, M/M, Meet-Cute, Pre-Relationship, kitchen fires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24631819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: Then he has a number of realizations in rapid succession: the first is that the guy at the door is not just hot but ratherHotand will be referred to as such because anything else would be a gross oversight on Oikawa’s part, and the second is that he just slammed the door in Hot guy’s face, and the third is that if he musses his hair real fast and leans up against the doorframe just so, then he can play it off as an accident and still look all artfully disheveled and attractive. Then he’ll strike up a conversation, get Hot guy’s name or number or something, and then once that’s done he’ll clean up the kitchen until every trace of his indignity is dead and gone and all is right with the world again.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 14
Kudos: 119





	and again and again

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for kitchen fires and some swearing
> 
> I’ve been into haikyuu for a while and I haven’t once written for these two so I figured that it was about time. The rest of this is just because Oikawa seems like the type of person to set spaghetti on fire, he just does. 
> 
> Also happy slightly early birthday to Iwaizumi!!

The wind outside is wild, warm in the way of a summer storm and battering against the sides of Oikawa’s creaky old apartment building until it bows and sways like a reed. It’s long gone dark because it’s not  _ extremely  _ late at night but it’s close enough that the sun’s been deep down below the horizon for a good hour or two by now; he’d made the bus ride from his university when the world was still ruby-red and he’d made the walk from the bus station when the sky was barely black, and now he’s back at home with his shoes kicked off near the door and his gear flung on the couch where it’s currently lying in wait for the day that he’s responsible enough to put it away properly.

Today is not that day. Today he is cooking and thinking about practice in the in-depth, exhaustive way that sometimes makes his coach give him a pat on the back and sometimes makes his teammates roll their eyes and inch away as he launches into his fifth play-by-play of the evening. There’s pasta in the pot on the stove that’s usually his favorite pot because it’s bright blue and a gift from his mother, but right now he likes it a little bit less because it’s an ugly orange-blue in the flickering light of the lamp and the whole situation is rudely reminding him that he chose that lamp solely for aesthetics- it’s no good for actual light at all. He’s stirring the pasta in repetitive and messy circles, and he’s not paying half as much attention as he probably should be, because he’s otherwise occupied with thoughts of Bokuto Koutarou who is one of his best friends and strongest spikers and exactly the sort of player that the team could build a good offense around if he could just figure out where to put the  _ rest _ of them.

That’s much more pressing than food, no matter  _ what _ others may try to tell him when he starts on with that mindset. So he keeps his analysis up as he cooks, getting well into it and humming something to keep himself occupied as he slowly redirects his thoughts to the team’s defense- he’s nothing if not thorough, and he’s gotta account for everything- and he’s sitting and stirring and everything is just fine right up until he smells something burning. 

“Oh,” he says, looking down to the pot which is filled with white-gray wisps. He lets his head tilt back and his eyes go crossed as he traces the path of the smoke from the pot on the stove in front of him to the ceiling high above, watches as it gathers in little strings of c-shaped curls. The vent sputters its death cries, hitched squeaks and screeches warbling shrill like a bell and cutting right on through his under-the-breath monologue about  _ stupid fucking pots and smoke _ . He halfheartedly flaps a washcloth in the general direction of the stove and watches as absolutely nothing changes. “Well that’s not right,” he grumbles. He reaches over to the stovetop and prods the knob, fiddles with the settings and then leans back to examine the extent of the damage. 

And then the pasta catches on fire.

Now, several very, very quick notes about Oikawa Tooru (shared in a desperate attempt to maintain appearances): he is a number of things in one very valuable package. He’s the captain of the volleyball team at his university- a hard-sought, hard-earned title- and he was voted Most Handsome by his classmates for all three years of his high school career, and a woman that he helped at the grocery store once called him a _nice young man._ He has a scar on his shoulder that there’s no story behind and one on his knee that there’s entirely too much history packed into, and when people ask he likes to switch them so that the shoulder-scar came from a rabid raging animal or an act of (increasingly elaborate) act of heroism while the knee-scar was from nothing more than a slip and fall on the playground when he was ten years old. He’s not nice but he’s not mean; he’s mastered the art of the passive conversation, the sort where he smiles and nods and looks both invested enough to be polite and closed off but not so much that it’s rude.

He can juggle. He can’t draw. He tried to learn how to play the trombone once and was so bad at it that everyone in his house nearly cried, but if he tells that story right then it comes off as endearing rather than as a shortcoming or failure on his part. 

But that’s all irrelevant right now, no matter how good he’d like to make himself look- saving face again and again, even when alone- because the only thing that really matters right now is that he can’t cook for  _ shit. _

So earlier when he’d gotten home and pulled out the bright-blue pot and dumped a whole box of penne pasta into it before plopping it right on the stove, he didn’t stop once to think that maybe he might need to add some  _ water.  _ And once he’d gotten the heat up and was standing still, thinking of nothing but his front-line spikers as the pasta sizzled away, dry as a bone in a pot as hot as the desert-

Well, the pasta caught on fire.

_ “Shit,”  _ Oikawa gasps when he’s finally snapped back into himself after his thirty seconds of ill-timed introspection and the situation has set in. “Shit, shit,  _ shit! _ ”

He shouts, bouncing back on the arches of his feet and scrabbling backwards as far away from the fire as he can get. The tiny flame is slowly coaxing itself into a larger flame and Oikawa’s trying to remember everything that he knows about putting out kitchen fires but his brain’s only supplying him with the names and positions of his team’s starting players, which isn’t exactly useful when something is on  _ fire.  _ His hands run up against the counter and his fingers skitter over the laminate as his heels press flush against the cabinets and his mind goes  _ woosh  _ like the winds outside. His flailing hits his keys to the floor-  _ clang _ \- and then his half-filled waterbottle-  _ thump,  _ followed by a sad splash or two- and then he knocks over a pile of papers and those don’t make any sound at all but by this point he’s making enough noise for all of those things combined because the pasta is on  _ fire _ and his kitchen is on  _ fire  _ and he’s got to put out the  _ fire fire fire  _ because  _ fire  _ is dangerous and there’s a  _ fire.  _

Through some small mercy he remembers something about smothering and makes a dive for the cabinet near the fridge, throwing the door wide open and rooting through his meager kitchen supplies for something that will do the trick. He has to wade through some cookware that he didn’t even know he had- highlights include a sunflower yellow saucepan with a hole in the handle and some weird fucking pan thing that juts out to one sharp point- but he gets a lid in hand and scrambles over to the stovetop on all fours, pitching up on his knees to slide it over the pot and then slapping at the knob until the heat is dashed down to nothing. 

He stays there for a moment on the floor, chest heaving and breath coming in pants until he works up the bravery to check on the  _ fire.  _ A few quick movements and false alarms later he deems it appropriately dead and that would be that except now someone’s knocking at the door and as he sits there in complete disarray, the contents of his cabinet spread all out on the floor and the last few vestiges of smoke clinging stubbornly to the walls, he realizes that he may have been just a little, tiny bit loud.

The knocking gets more involved. The knocking gets more aggressive. The knocking is soon accompanied by a deep voice asking if  _ everything is alright in there, and do you need me to call someone or something?  _ Oikawa decides that he may as well face the consequences of his actions and hoists himself up and over to the door, hair all matted against one side of his face and sweat settled in a light sheen over his neck and eyes just a little wilder than they would be had he not been faced with a  _ fire  _ at nine at night when he just wanted some pasta, but he’s alive and he’s moving and he’s grateful enough for that to make some concessions. He can deal with looking a little worse for a little while, just this once.

Now the moment that he opens the door and is met with an unfamiliar but very  _ attractive  _ face, he retracts that statement immediately and thinks that if the universe had the good graces to keep him intact then the least it could have done was make sure his hair looked alright afterwards. 

Hot guy that he doesn't recognize stands at his door and looks at him. Hot guy that he doesn’t recognize becomes  _ hot guy  _ in Oikawa’s mind because anything more elaborate is a little too much for him at the moment. Hot guy has gray-green eyes and dark brown hair and a look on his face like he just smelled something bad which in all fairness he probably did, because Oikawa’s kitchen is still filled with fucking smoke from the fucking  _ pasta.  _ He’s wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt with big stain on the left sleeve and has muscles, like  _ muscles,  _ like could-probably-snap-him-in-two muscles, and immediately Oikawa is hit with a wave of intense horror because hot guy is seeing him the  _ one  _ time that he looks like a mess, and well he can’t exactly get him to date him or marry him or adopt a number of small animals with him if he doesn’t look his absolute best, now can he?

“Oh my  _ god _ ,” hot guy says as he leans to look around Oikawa. He really does have a nice voice- it’s all low and smoky though in hindsight that may just be the fucking  _ smoke _ . “Is your kitchen on fire? What the  _ fuck  _ man, are you alri-”

Oikawa slams the door in his face.

Then he has a number of realizations in rapid succession: the first is that the guy at the door is not just hot but rather _Hot_ and will be referred to as such because anything else would be a gross oversight on Oikawa’s part, and the second is that he just slammed the door in Hot guy’s face, and the third is that if he musses his hair real fast and leans up against the doorframe just so, then he can play it off as an accident and still look all artfully disheveled and attractive. Then he’ll strike up a conversation, get Hot guy’s name or number or something, and then once that’s done he’ll clean up the kitchen until every trace of his indignity is dead and gone and all is right with the world again.

So he runs his fingers through his hair, careful as can be, and  _ thwaps _ one hand high up on the doorframe and does that thing where he stands titled to the left but it’s more involved than that (it’s all in the way he holds his torso) and then he puts on a smile and opens the door with a flourish.

“Hey,” he says, trying to flick his bangs out of his eyes without moving too much, because really he’s got this whole _flirting_ thing down to a science even with the burnt pasta and the smoke and the still-smoldering fires. “Is something hot in here, or is it just me?”

Hot guy’s face spasms. He grits his teeth and Oikawa can practically  _ see  _ the gears angrily chugging away inside his head. It’s kinda cute, actually. A lot cute.

“Your hair’s in your mouth,” Hot guy informs him, and that’s marginally  _ less  _ cute especially because his hair  _ is  _ in his mouth and he was sort of hoping that he could just play it off or they’d both ignore it out of societal convention or something. Regardless, this is nothing that he can’t deal with- good conversation’s all in the back-and-forth, after all, and he can still impress Hot guy even if he’s standing in a roomful of smoke and apparently trying to eat his own hair. He’s done crazier things before so this is  _ nothing.  _ Really. It has to be because he’s working on his last strand of pride and if that breaks he won’t know what to do with himself. 

“So it is,” he says. “This whole thing’s a bit of a hairy situation, yeah?”

Hot guy looks like he’s about to finish what Oikawa’s abysmal cooking skills started. So no puns, then. Knocks out about half of Oikawa’s repertoire, but he’s adaptable and he’s learned lots over the years so he can work with that. 

“...Right,” Hot guy says. “Look, I live a few doors down and I heard yelling so I came to see if anything was wrong but if everything’s alright, I’m just gonna…” he jams a thumb over his shoulder.

“ _ Wait! _ ” Oikawa yelps. Hot guy jumps a bit, and Oikawa gives the sort of high-pitched, awkward-flirty laugh that he usually saves for getting discounts at the deli, but desperate times and desperate measures and all that. “Wait, wait, everything’s fine, I just had a  _ tiny  _ bit of a cooking accident. You know how it is. I was thinking about volleyball- I’m the captain of my team over at my university- and well I guess that I got a little distracted somewhere along the way and then the next thing you know…” he shrugs, makes a helpless gesture at the kitchen.

Hot guy levels him with an unimpressed look. Then he leans to look at the kitchen then back to Oikawa and then does the same thing once more just to add insult to injury. “You started a fire?”

“And put out a fire.”

Hot guy looks even more unimpressed which Oikawa thinks is rather impressive. He didn’t know that one person’s face could be so devastatingly  _ disapproving.  _

“Really?” Hot guy says. “It still looks pretty damn bad in there to me. Did you at least open a window or something?”

Oikawa blinks at him. “A window?”

Hot guy pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes in deep. “How the fuck are you  _ alive _ ?” he asks, looking dead serious and then some. 

“Well,” Oikawa coughs and then he keeps coughing and yeah, yeah that’s fair.

“Shit,” Hot guy says, and then again but resigned and with his hand coming down to sprawl over the side of his face. “Just- can I come in?”

“Forward,” Oikawa says, voice all hoarse from the coughing but he’s still got it. He does, he does, he  _ does.  _ “At least let me make you dinner first.”

“And burn the whole place down? Absolutely not.” Hot guy shoulders past him and stalks over to the kitchen and Oikawa follows with what feels like little birds flitting around his head. He watches on as Hot guy throws open the window and then does a number of other things that involve checking the pots and the stovetop and the ceiling and Oikawa has no idea what’s happening but he’s burnt through all the fucks he has to give for the day, so if Hot guy wants to start climbing the walls like a spider or stealing from the stash of chocolates that Oikawa definitely does not keep above the fridge than more power to him. 

He doesn’t, thankfully, because as much as Oikawa may pretend otherwise he cares about those chocolates- they were  _ expensive _ . He just keeps moving and the little birds around Oikawa’s head are joined by squishy-fluttery butterflies in his throat.

“There,” Hot guy says, satisfied, once he’s gotten the kitchen back in order- Oikawa doesn’t know how he did it, nevermind so fast, and he was  _ watching _ \- “That should take care of that.”

“Of what?” Oikawa asks, still mystified. 

“That,” he replies, waving vaguely at the whole kitchen. “That. All of it.”

“Oh,” Oikawa says. Hot guy is smiling to himself, hands on his hips as he surveys his handiwork and it’s doing a number of very strange things to Oikawa’s stomach, and as he’s not equipped to deal with that right now he figures that the best he can do is just keep carrying on and see where it takes him. “And who exactly do I have to thank for that? All of it?”

Hot guy snort-laughs (and again that’s very cute but Oikawa thinks he's established that by now) and seems in a good enough mood to throw him a bone because he holds out a hand in a practiced gesture- Oikawa wonders if he meets  _ all  _ of his neighbors like this- and gives him a grin that’s all teeth but no sharpness. “Iwaizumi Hajime.”

A wisp of smoke slithers out the window and dissipates in the summer heat, and Oikawa gives a smile of his own that’s as sharp and sweet as can be as he folds his hand into Iwaizumi’s. It’s warm and strong and sturdy, as solid as the rest of him and calloused near the fingertips, much like Oikawa’s. It’s somewhat comforting to see that part of himself reflected in Iwaizumi; it implies that if he tries, then they can probably find  _ some  _ sort of common ground if it comes to that, and he likes to have a fallback or two just in case. 

“Oikawa Tooru.”

“Well, nice to meet you Oikawa,” Iwaizumi (and that really is a lot to say isn’t it, he’s going to have to find some sort of nickname) says, pulling away from Oikawa and moving back towards the center of the kitchen. He claps his hands together once, looking over the cabinets. “Now. Where do you keep the pasta?”

“What?” Oikawa says, hesitant and more than a little confused because  _ what.  _ Hot guy just gives him another look, softer than the others but still with an edge of amused annoyance.

“Well someone has to make sure that you don’t burn the whole place down,” he starts, “And I’m not the best at cooking but I’m sure as hell not as bad as  _ this _ , and if I’m here it may as well be me. Just this once though, so next time you go to make pasta make sure to add fucking  _ water,  _ yeah?”

Oikawa grimaces, rubbing at the back of his head. “You saw that then?”

“I cleaned out the pot. It was kinda hard to miss.”   
  


Oikawa doesn’t think that any number of puns or laughs tailored for flirting at the deli are going to get him out of this one. All that practice maintaining appearances and all it takes is a box of pasta and exactly one Hot neighbor to throw him off completely. 

“Oh,” he says, wincing. He’d say that that one syllable non-reaction was embarrassing but his soul is currently vacating his body and is taking his ability to feel anything beyond fuzz with it, so he’ll have to put an exact name to things later. Preferably when he can feel his face again.

“Oh,” Iwaizumi parrots wryly. His expression softens then, probably because Oikawa looks thirty seconds and a good strong shock away from death. “Look man, we’ve all been there. Nobody was hurt and the pot wasn’t even fucked up that bad, so just let me do this and then we can avoid each other in the hall or on the stairs or in the elevator or something, I dunno, but we can pretend that it never happened and move on with our lives. It’s really not that big a deal and it should  _ stay  _ that way.”

That’s… nice. Very nice. A little mean but nice in spirit, and Oikawa’s always loved a good contradiction- he’s particularly fond of the space between competent-incompetent himself, because he may be considered an up and coming volleyball star but he also couldn’t work the tv until he was fifteen years old. That’s more common ground, another fallback, and at this rate these points of contact are going to be less  _ fallbacks  _ and more  _ groundwork  _ and that’s making him feel all weird and warm and gushy inside.

“Awww,” Oikawa coos, the only thing that he can really get out because most of his brain is busy melting into mush. “Iwa-chan! That’s so  _ nice _ !”

Iwaizumi blinks. “Iwa-  _ what _ .”

Oikawa brushes past him, flinging open the pantry and ignoring all of Iwaizumi’s progressively louder protests as he gets out another box of pasta- they better get it right this time, he only has so much- and pushes back past Iwaizumi, brandishing it in victory. “Alright! Let’s do this! We should probably get out another pot, I keep them down in the cabinet by the fridge which you  _ know  _ I guess because you put them away-“

He continues on as Iwaizumi grows more and more outraged at his nickname, cackling loudly and then being horrified because that was his  _ actual  _ laugh and not one of the ones that he puts on for others and then cackling even  _ louder  _ when it becomes clear that Iwaizumi really doesn’t care. And as he dances around the third swat Iwaizumi directed at his arm, Oikawa’s hit with the very strong conviction that this is probably the last semi-peaceful night of his neighbor’s life because Oikawa’s not really the  _ avoid in the hallway  _ type and he’s already decided that he and Iwaizumi are going to be friends (and if he’s real smart about it at some point they  _ will  _ get a hamster together), and Oikawa likes all of his friends to know his other friends and most of his friends right now are very loud, so- 

Well, it’s not all that difficult to put all the pieces together. It’s even easier when he’s eating a plate of (non-burned) pasta fifteen minutes later and Iwaizumi is right there with him and they’re laughing and bickering like they’ve known each other for years, the sounds of traffic floating through the open window and the ugly aesthetic-only lamp flickering in dramatic shades of red-orange-red-orange. It’s even easier when Oikawa gets his hands on Iwaizumi’s phone before he leaves and inputs his name and number as Iwaizumi grumbles that it’s  _ only so he doesn’t get himself killed  _ but smiles at the long and involved string of emojis (only the best, after all) that Oikawa put after his name before he slips it back into his pocket, and it’s the easiest of all when he texts him the next day, early in the morning- a short message,  _ hey, its iwaizumi,  _ but it’s a start. And really, that’s all that Oikawa’s ever needed. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you made it this far!! I love hearing from you guys!


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